


Desperation and Disease

by manyface



Category: Crypt of the NecroDancer
Genre: F/M, Gen, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 09:28:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13338366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manyface/pseuds/manyface





	Desperation and Disease

Like a disease, his desperation spreads.  
Devotion's haze obscures her perfect eyes  
Now glazed with tears and fever. At her bed  
And on his knees, her husband prays and cries.

For her, he offers in an aching breath,   
He will traverse the world and find a cure  
To liberate her from untimely death.  
Only with love, with his intentions pure,

He doesn't hear her pleas to stay away,  
To never seek the treasure, never find  
What could have saved her on that rotten day.  
The search for it now rules his broken mind. 

There is no set of maps he hasn't read:  
By day, by night, he practices and learns.  
His daughter learning loneliness instead  
While Dorian imagines his return:

Melody's corpse, her thin, decaying bones  
Revived by the lute's magic, and he knows  
That it is worth the time he spends alone,  
And, like a plague, his desperation grows. 

Meticulous and perfect, he departs,  
His home barely a remnant of his quest.  
Cadence will understand, his maxim starts,   
Whatever I do now, it's for the best.

With misery that festers on his skin,  
On memories he chokes, and tears apart  
The ancient crypt he navigates within  
Until he meets its nauseating heart.

He's weak, so weak. The NecroDancer binds  
His soul into an animated toy,  
For he has let the lute control his mind,  
For decades. He's delightful to destroy.

His agony revealed, the undead feed  
On his corrupted love. There's nothing left:  
He stands and guards. Each order he will heed:  
Powerless, empty, blissfully bereft,

And even when he meets her face to face,   
His daughter, an adventurer now, cursed  
With his same burden, in devotion's haze  
He strikes, hoping to kill, and even worse

Deliver her, who has now come so far,  
To his sick puppeteer, but she prevails.  
The wit he's lost, the soul that has been marred  
She plays with ease and tricks him. He has failed, 

And with the sound of one collossal bell,   
Humanity has triumphed. Fatherhood  
Creates itself again, once dragged through hell.  
Apologies cascade: he's understood. 

His daughter works the lute to kill the bard,   
The beast whose evil Dorian possessed.   
She plays it with a free and lively art,   
Her music with vitality is blessed.

Now they dig up an old, neglected grave.  
As Cadence plucks the strings, her father pales:  
His love, who he has yearned so long to save  
Opens her eyes: so desperate, so frail.


End file.
